Fading Light: An Anthology of the Monstrous: Tim Marquitz by Tim Marquitz Page B

crawling across this valley to meet us, we’ll
have a battle on our hands, no mistaking.
    Thomas considered this for a moment, eyeing the
approaching weather front.
    “How can you be so sure of that?” he asked.
“You can’t possibly know Boney’s soldiers will
arrive with the rainfall. That’s bloody mad.”
    “Aye,” said Foss, “but them’s
not normal clouds, laddy, cos they’s moving towards us against
the wind.”
    Thomas stared hard at the cloudbank. He hadn’t
noticed it before, but it was true. Only the lightest of breezes
stirred the evening air and it was indeed coming from the west, the
opposite direction from which the French approached. Suddenly cold,
he tightened his grip on his rifle, taking little comfort from the
metal in his hands. No cloud Thomas had ever seen could move against
the wind, and he began to contemplate, for the first time, that
perhaps the stories he had heard about the sorcerer, Napoleon, were
true.
    “What does it mean?” he asked, swallowing
hard on the sudden lump in his throat.
    The sergeant took his eyes from the horizon and regarded
his young companion with growing concern.
    “It means we might be in trouble, lad,” he
whispered through gritted teeth, before returning his attention to
the sky.

    ~

    The duke was becoming agitated. He had sent out riders
well over an hour ago to scout for the approaching foe, and not one
of them had returned. He hated guessing, but without a steady supply
of information, his tactical prowess counted for nought. The
Patriarch of the Ucléan Brotherhood had offered to scry for
him, but Wellington was uneasy enough about the bargain he made
without capitulating further. Now, forced into making a decision
based solely on local topography and instinct, he turned in his
saddle and beckoned a runner to him.
    “Tell the monks to make ready,” he
instructed, watching the junior officer depart in the direction of
the nearest column.
    The mist, previously infesting the ground, had now
matured into a substantial fog through which it was difficult to make
out anything more than half a mile away. Above, the stars had
vanished behind a similar curtain of vapour. With the moon obscured,
the valley had become a dark and foreboding place.
    Within the confines of the walls of fog, sounds were
reflected back, and the duke could hear the nervous chattering of his
men as if he stood amongst them. He swiveled to his left and
observed his corps of engineers making final preparations to the
artillery.
    Congreve had assured him that vast improvements had been
made to the rockets since their first inept deployment during the
Indian campaigns. The colonel had spoken of the addition of something
called a Revenant Sphere to the warhead of each missile. Wellington
did not profess to fully comprehend the inner workings of the device,
having chosen not to get involved in Sir William’s dealings
with the Brotherhood, but he understood it had something to do with
unleashing the souls of the recent dead upon approaching soldiers.
    The souls had been harvested from the numerous corpses
littering the surrounding villages by the zealous acolytes of the
Brotherhood. Having already been robbed of their existence by the
French dogs, the duke figured that giving these men and women a
chance at gaining some revenge was the least he could do. Still
though, he preferred the abrupt certainty of a cannonball to all this
mumbo jumbo. That was why he requested Congreve construct his suit of
overlapping armor. If he was going to wade into battle against
Napoleon’s inhuman devils, then he was going to make damn sure
he took the necessary precautions. The only trouble was that the
infernal contraption was so damn heavy! He felt like an accursed
medieval knight in all this get-up, and if the fog bank elected to
come any closer, he would have more to worry about than just the
French.

    ~

    Thomas near jumped from his skin as a robed figure
strode past him down the line. Quickly